The Open Source Portfolio (OSP) software for eportfolio learning and assessment has seen widespread adoption over the last five years. This article surveys the current state of OSP development and use and shares results of research on its effectiveness, conducted through the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research.

One of the strategic initiatives approved last fall by the Strategic Planning Council, the Academy has goals that include enhancing professional development for faculty, assisting in the formation of graduate students as scholar-teachers and promoting the scholarship of teaching and learning through new areas of research.

One qualitative study, which surely won't be welcomed by manufacturers of basic word processing software, found that students who create and edit documents using Web-based collaboration tools include more complex visual media in their assignments - and come away with a better understanding in the process. Another ongoing experiment finds, with statistical significance, that instructors can be more effective in grading students' work if they record their comments directly into documents as audio.

Assessment and accreditation portfolios tend to include quantitative measures of student performance gauged against a set of learning outcomes that have been identified by an instructor, program, department or institution. By using reports that aggregate and analyze data surrounding student learning in relation to a predefined set of educational outcomes, these types of portfolios provide a rich source of information about the actual results of the teaching and learning process and can therefore help institutions align their institutional practice with their stated institutional mission or goals.

Dartmouth faculty in diverse departments including Government, Art History, Arabic, Writing, Native American Studies and Women Studies were excited to assign video projects and wanted to give students a more active and engaged learning experience. However, the faculty did not have a clear understanding of the processes involved to support such a project or how to integrate this type of assignment into the curriculum. To insure success, we needed to develop a more ambitious, comprehensive and seamless support services between curricular computing, the library's media center, and the peer-tutoring center. This session will illustrate how we've "de-silotized" the pedagogical and technical support and share students' feedback about their experiences.

In the recent past, I wrote about not really getting Twitter. Since then, I have to say that it has grown on me. I am not and never will be an addict. But it does add a nice social dimension to my day, particularly given that I work alone from my home office a lot of the time. It lets me feel a little more connected with friends and colleagues, and does so without taking up unacceptable amounts of time. So, for my former fellow Twitter skeptics, I have a few suggestions for how to get the most out of it:

Fall 2008 is the first semester UD has offered Sakai to all faculty teaching credit courses. "We had set goals of about 120 faculty using approximately 180 Sakai courses during fall 2008," said Janet de Vry, IT-User Services. "Faculty use has exploded past those targets."

This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances-especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies even in situations where the law provides no specific authorization for the use in question-as it does for certain narrowly defined classroom activities.

Ideas are powerful, especially when they have become beliefs and have been unquestioned for generations. Three in particular may be standing in the way of more faculty using our new learning tools in enlightened ways.

Assuming learning is about acquiring content is a distortion of reality. Learning is about learning how to learn. It is a social process: For young people the social process must be tangible, present, and immediate; for more advanced learners, the social context is internalized but still indispensable.

Before the VBrick system was in place, according to Daniel Greene, Bryant's media production specialist, professors had to physically visit the library, select a video, download it to a portable media such as disk or tape, and carry it to class. When the university purchased a large number of professionally produced educational documentary videos several years ago, it became obvious that a better system was needed to manage and distribute them.

A recent report from the University of Wisconsin-Madison E-Business Institute, "Insights Regarding Undergraduate Preference for Lecture Capture", has revealed just how important class capture is in the minds of today's college students: According to the survey, an impressive 82 percent of respondents (7,500 UW undergraduate and graduate students) prefer courses with an online lecture option. Sixty percent are even willing to pay for lecture capture services, preferably on a course-by-course basis.

You will find this site useful if you are interested in: - Elizabethan and Jacobean England - English drama - The history of books and reading - The history of printing and publishing - The life of William Shakespeare - The works of William Shakespeare - Theatre history